


The Black Clouds, The Cloud of Dust

by Margo_Kim



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Kissing in the Rain, POV Cheedo, Post-Mad Max: Fury Road, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:18:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5248022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Furiosa told her boys to get inside once the rains come. "It's poison," she said over the loudspeakers. "Acid. You cannot drink it. Don't let it touch your skin." </i>
</p>
<p>A rain storm comes to Citadel and brings a guest with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Black Clouds, The Cloud of Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt over on tumblr for Max/Furiosa, kissing in the rain. It got long enough that I thought I might spare everyone on tumblr mobile for whom readmores don't work and post it over here.

Furiosa told her boys to get inside once the rains come. "It's poison," she said over the loudspeakers. "Acid. You cannot drink it. Don't let it touch your skin."

To the sisters, Furiosa told the same and told Cheedo to cover the gardens in the thick tarp that Furiosa had commandeered for the mechanics. Cheedo and the Dag had spent the afternoon drawing tight the barriers over their fledgling plants, crafting partially sealed bubble of plastic and shadow. Furiosa had promised them a house of clear plastic someday, where the buds of the world's last seeds might be a little more protected from the world that has no use for them, but that promise was a long way off, and the rains were coming now. The clouds grew black and heavy over the expanse of the land, and Cheedo felt the small hand on her back that meant the Dag stood behind her. "There'll be rain in the desert before there's peace on earth," the Dag said.

"Miss Giddy said there used to be plenty of rain in the desert," Cheedo replied. "That was when the land blossomed. Then the rain went away."

"Underground," the Dag agreed, her head half-tilted towards the earth beneath them where water churned down in the dark. It was something like faith, that was what Angharad had once said to Cheedo when she had been convincing Cheedo to run with them (as if Cheedo could have stayed behind, as if Angharad ever gave Cheedo the choice. Angharad knew that Cheedo would not want to be alone, and after she knew that and the other sisters were going, then it didn't really matter what Cheedo wanted)—you trust that the water is there, though you never go down there and look. You trust because it comes when it's called, you trust because you taste it with the lips and tongue and hands and skin that tell you what to trust in this world. You trust that the water is there, underneath your feet, even if Joe tells you he creates it anew each day himself. You trust that the world will give you water, and thus that it will give you good, if you know the right ways to tap into the darkest parts of the earth.

"Do you think that'll do it?" Cheedo asked the Dag.

The Dag grabbed Cheedo's hand and raised it, gently maneuvering it until the palm held flat against the sky. She squinted as if she could blight the storm clouds from existence by refusing to see them. "What do the urchins of the wasteland know of rain? When it comes, it comes."

Then the Dag shrugged and pressed her lips against Cheedo's soft palm. The Dag's lips were cracked and brittle with the desert winds. Life outside Joe's pleasure prison was turning their bodies into badlands. Freedom was a jagged beauty.

The black clouds grew and rolled in the sky. Down below, a cloud of dust outraced them. Both were headed straight for the Citadel.

By the time the Dag and Cheedo rushed down to tell Furiosa, she knew. She was in what was Joe's old war room, the room where the Milking Mothers still worked and lived and managed the life of Citadel. She stood on the parapet with the eyeglass raised. Toast stood behind her, a supporting hand resting on Furiosa's hip. "Trouble?" Capable asked.

Furiosa did not lower the eyeglass. She did not respond. Toast glanced back over her shoulder at Cheedo and the Dag, offered them a small smile, asked, "Are the gardens secure?"

"I think so," Cheedo said. "The boys are tying a few more things down and we're hoping, yeah, I mean, maybe."

"Maybe?" Toast replied.

"We've never had to protect plants from rain before. I don't know if I did it right." Cheedo felt the Dag tug on the bottom of Cheedo's braid, a reminder of a conversation about confidence that Cheedo kept forgetting. "But I did my best," she added. "It's as good as we can make it."

"You'd know better than anyone," Toast said, turning her eyes back to Furiosa. "We’ve got the two best damn gardeners in the living world." Toast reached up to rest her hand against Furiosa's arm. Furiosa broke away from her view to look down. The two women shared a look that Cheedo didn't understand (she was of the growing things of the earth, and a poor speaker of the language of caution and war) before Furiosa stepped down from the ledge and handed Toast the eyeglass. "You think it's a friendly?" Toast asked. "Do we have any of those around?"

Capable came in as Toast was speaking, her arms laden down with the ledger books she and the Mothers used for record keeping. "The boys downstairs said we got incoming," she said as she dropped the books on the table by the charcoal sticks that the Dag had been whittling. "That what you're talking about?"

"We don't know they're coming," Furiosa said as she took her place behind Toast, a careful grip on her belt while Toast stood on the parapet to take her look.

"As the rig drives," Toast said. "They're heading right for us."

Cheedo wrapped her arms around herself. The Dag wrapped her arms around Cheedo. "It's just one?" she asked.

"As far I can see," said Toast. "Can't hardly tell through the dust right now. The wind's blowing our way, covering everything between us and it."

"Rain flattens the dust," said the Dag. "Rain melts the stranger."

"Could be someone seeking shelter from the storm," Capable said to Furiosa whose mouth was hard as the rock that surrounded them. "I know I'd be scared as hell out there if I saw those clouds coming."

"You suggesting we throw open our gates?" Toast asked.

"Yeah, I guess," Capable replied. "There's a hell of a lot more of us than them if they want to start trouble."

Toast lowered the eyeglass and looked down at Furiosa who looked up, and in their silence and their eyes, an agreement was reached.

"If they come, let them in," Furiosa said. "Keep them to the quarantine shelter. Don't give them food."

The Dag bent to Cheedo's ear. “Rain means change. The growth of new things. A good time to plant seeds."

"Not our seeds," Cheedo replied and kissed the Dag from worry.

The downfall of the sky came in a straight line across the parched earth, and the sand drank deep the poison poured into it. The car in the wasteland raised ahead of it. The rain was acid, that was what Miss Giddy had said, and it melted skin until it dripped like oil from the bones it covered. But not right away. You had a minute, maybe two, before the burning began. That was why Cheedo followed the Dag down to the entry way, normally packed with bodies, now empty as the waste outside. If the Dag was intent on dancing in the rain, then Cheedo would be there to drag her back before the dancing was done. It was what they did in the gardens every day together. The Dag made the plants grow; Cheedo kept the plants from dying.

Furiosa waited for them in the alcove by the door, leaning against the clay walls the boys had repaired not two weeks ago. Her arms were crossed, her head tucked down. She raised her eyes as Cheedo and the Dag approached. "I said to stay out of the rain."

The Dag smiled. "The rain's yet not here."

Furiosa shook her head the way she did sometimes in place of smiling. "You know your limits." It was the closest thing to a blessing that they would get, though perhaps Furiosa's presence was the blessing itself. Cheedo to pull back her Dag; Furiosa to pull back her girls.

"Has our visitor arrived?" Cheedo asked as the Dag removed the Keeper of the Seed’s vest, folded it carefully, placed it where it was sure to stay dry.

Furiosa jerked her chin at the hoodoos that marked the entrance to Citadel. "Not yet. Toast's on watch."

"She's a good shot," Cheedo said.

"The best."

After a moment, Cheedo went to lean against the wall beside Furiosa, and there they kept their silence together, the warmth of their arms almost touching, as the Dag knelt underneath the overhang and prayed for the rain to come.

And the rain came.

And the car came as well, skidding in between the hoodoos on wheels unused to mud, the rain having come so suddenly and so hard it was as if someone had opened the gates and let the water flow down, as if the land was emptying itself of its secret water below. Cheedo could not see for the rain, except that she saw the Dag rush forward, into sheeting rain like an iron plate crashing down, and though Cheedo could not hear her own thoughts over the roar of the downpour, she could hear the Dag's gasp of pain.

So Cheedo ran out as well, and the car opened, and a wastrel burst out and hit the ground and began to crawl, then limp, then run. They passed each other, the man and Cheedo, one running towards the dry and other towards the wet.

And Cheedo marked him not because she understood now that the Dag's gasp could not have been of pain. The pain would come later. Now there was just the rain upon her skin, and in her hair, and under her feet, the mud squelching between her toes, and then there was the Dag in her arms as they embraced each other with such spinning ferocity they both lifted the other off of the ground. And the rain fell, and the rain fell, and the rain did not yet burn, except on the inside.

The Dag had to press her mouth against Cheedo's ears just for her shouting to be heard. "Our rain is wrong!" she said. "It brings back only the forgotten old."

“The hell you’re saying?” Cheedo laughed, her kisses wet and happy against the Dag’s face, and it wasn’t until the Dag’s small white hands like clouds reached up to move Cheedo’s face, to point it back towards Citadel and the dryness they would have to return to soon, soon, and rinse themselves of the water of the sky with the water of the ground before the scarring began, it wasn’t until Cheedo’s face turned towards home that she saw.

Furiosa embraced Max around the neck, her body flushed against him as the rain came down, came down, came soaking down and seeped into them. And Max, for it was Max, for Cheedo would know the gentleness of those hands upon Furiosa’s arms anywhere, touched her like he had forgotten how. The leather of his jacket was starting to smoke as the rain drilled into it, and he held perfectly still as Furiosa cupped the back of his head and breathed her lips against his.

It was the Dag who felt the drops turn bitter, the Dag who took Cheedo’s hands and began to run as Cheedo dragged her feet through the mud for another moment, just one more moment out here in the rain. But then she felt the sting as well, and began to run in earnest, and as they ran, they grabbed Furiosa and Max and ran with them as well. In the overhang, where the land was still dry as the bones still covered by their unsloughed skin, the Dag began to strip Cheedo, Cheedo began to strip the Dag, the rain still settled in their clothes, their hair. They could not get into the showers quickly enough, showers that ran the runoff water from the gardens above, the gardens tarped over so that the seeds might never know even a hint of the sky’s water. As they scrubbed each other’s hair, they heard the buckles and stomp behind them of frantic disrobing, and in burst Max, still kicking off his boots, and Furiosa, yanking off her arm. Cheedo pulled the Dag to the side as Furiosa and Max ducked under the water stream. Furiosa worked her fingers through his beard while he ran his hands through her hair. It would be longer than he remembered, Cheedo realized. It was long enough to grab now.

Cheedo wrapped her arms around the Dag as the runoff of the earth ran down on their naked flesh, as the Dag turned around to bury her face in Cheedo’s neck. Furiosa and Max did not look their way as they rinsed each other of the poison water. They were naked themselves, and when Max lowered his hand to brush the scar in Furiosa’s side, Cheedo lowered her eyes to brush the ground. The Dag’s body surrounded her. The world was an embrace. Rain fell in the desert around them, and water swelled beneath their feet. Rain fell and made acrid the air with the promise of blossoming.


End file.
